In the Wake of a Memory
by DCFanatic4life
Summary: Dolph couldn't remember, and AJ didn't want to tell him...Dolph/AJ


**Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or real people portrayed in this story. The characters are owned by the WWE and the people own themselves. Tame fic so feel free to proceed.**

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A/N: I was having a couple conversations, and the idea of AJ's tweet about reminding Dolph he proposed on Monday after his concussion knocked Monday from his brain, I decided to write this. So here it is. Turned out differently than I imagined, but I enjoyed writing it nonetheless. Anyways, it's like a real fic, but I just kept their in character names because it's easier.

Now here's the tricky part. I kind of like it as a one-shot, and I kind of want to continue it. I do have an idea in mind for another chapter, but it's all up to you if you want another one. I'll put complete on the thing, but really, if prompted, I will write another chapter, so just let me know if you think I should keep it as is or put in another chapter. I do hope you enjoy, and as always, if you want to be brutal, I encourage you to do so! :)

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She played it off well enough.

She didn't want him to feel bad, not after suffering such a serious head injury. So she ignored it because he didn't know, didn't remember, and she figured he wouldn't want it to be like that. She figured that when the moment did come (again now), he would want to remember it, relish in it because he'd obviously been planning it for a while, something perfect, funny, and spontaneous, just like them. So she didn't want to ruin it for him, didn't want to make him feel like he was a failure or something because his memories were knocked out of his brain, washed away like sand from shore.

She wondered, briefly, where memories could go. Did they just evaporate into thin air, were they purged from your brain, split over and forced out? She wondered how something so important could just vanish like that, and if she was the only one to remember, did it even really happen? Would her own mind someday skew it, twist it, and turn it around so it no longer resembled a memory, but became something of a myth. She didn't know, and she couldn't dwell on it because dwelling meant thinking about how only she could remember one of the most important events of her life and his life, and their life.

"It's just so weird," he said, shaking his head, as if the cobwebs were still clinging tightly. He winced a little at the movement and she nearly rushed to his side, but settled for coming over and hooking her arm through his. "I can walk, babe."

"I know, but it makes me feel better if you try not to overexert yourself," she told him, leading him over to the couch. She'd put nearly every pillow in the house on the couch to make him more comfortable, and he laughed at her pillow mountain when he first saw it.

"Walking from the kitchen to the living room?" he asked, throwing her a little smirk. He was more like himself today than he had been for the past few days, ever since a blow to the head knocked two days from his mind.

"Yes, I don't care," she told him, "You don't remember, but I do. Come on, sit down."

"I'm sitting, I'm sitting," he told her, lowering himself onto the couch after moving a few of the pillows. "The interview went well, I mean, I think it did—"

"Can you not remember it?" she asked him quickly, ready to have the doctor on speed dial if he so much as forgot one second of something that only happened a few minutes ago. Dolph could see her fingers itching for her phone, but he shook his head again.

"No, I remember it, I'm just saying that I think it went alright, I mean, it's just strange giving such an interview, like, I've never had to give one on my health and I'm trying to remember everything the doctor told me, _not_ because I don't remember it but because it was a lot of technical stuff, and I'm not a doctor."

"I know," she told him, glad that his memory was intact and wishing that the things he forgot would come back as well. "I just want to make sure you're comfortable. I know that I have to leave early tomorrow morning even though I don't want to—"

"You're going, you already dropped everything for me, and I'm not going to make you stay with me when I can take care of myself," Dolph told her, and she frowned. This was a fight they had the day before, even through his terrible headache, an aftereffect of the concussion he was still recovering from. She opened her mouth to protest, but he pressed his index finger against her lips. "You're going, that's final. Besides, someone has to represent us if I can't be there."

"It doesn't feel right leaving you here," AJ replied, biting her lip as he removed his finger from them. "It doesn't feel right leaving you here while you're still recovering. I'm sure that they'll understand."

"Yeah, but I won't, look, my head is a lot clearer today, and you're pretty much sitting around here doing nothing," he shrugged, "just go, and don't make this hard, and don't make me fight you on this."

"You can't fight me, you can't do anything," AJ shook her head, "so if I wanted to stay, I could."

"Except you're not, face it," he told her, "I'm an adult—"

"With a concussion," she interjected, as if he needed reminding. But maybe he did, maybe he needed constant reminding because sometimes she thought he thought he could just go out there and be himself again despite the fact he forgot two whole days of his life.

"That's getting better," he added, and she scowled, but he leaned forward and kissed her anyways. "I'll be fine for two days, besides, I know people, if I need help, I've got people around, okay?"

"I'm not going to fight with you over this again," she told him, "so I'll drop it, but I'm still not happy about it."

"Thank you," he told her, giving her a cheesy grin as he laid his head down in her lap. She'd started doing this a couple days ago when his head was especially hurting him, and apparently this was their new thing. He would lay his head in her lap and she would stroke his hair. It calmed him, he told her that first night, and it made his head ache a little less. So she started massaging his scalp gently.

"So…are we going to watch SmackDown tonight?" he asked her, but didn't look up at her.

"I don't know, depends on you," she told him, "it's not that bad, I mean, the blow didn't look that bad…"

"But you were still worried," he finished for her and he could hear her sigh. Even if he hadn't heard her sigh, he would have known how she felt. He'd asked E how she was when he was out of it, how she was the night it happened. Terrified, that's the word E used, terrified. Big E wasn't one to mince words, and that one word froze him to the core. He was almost glad he couldn't remember that because he never wanted to see a moment where his girlfriend was terrified and alone without him there to comfort her.

"Of course I was, what do you take me for?" she asked him rhetorically. She sighed again and went back to massaging his scalp. He closed his eyes for a moment, not to sleep, not to rest, but to try and conjure up any memory of those lost two days.

But he couldn't. He kept trying, but there was some kind of mental block, like a wall was right in front of him. He could remember Sunday, meeting up with AJ at their hotel, kissing her hello, falling into their hotel room together, fooling around for a little while, taking her out to dinner, taking her back from dinner, fooling around which led to more, and then it was gone. Everything from that point on was just…gone. He kept trying to break the wall, see what was on the other side, but there was just a blank wall staring back at him.

He'd never lost days before. He'd never faced a time when he literally lost memories of entire days. He could not remember Raw or driving to SmackDown or SmackDown, and it was scary to know that he lost something so large. It didn't matter that it was only two days, they were two days he wasn't getting back. He and AJ watched Raw when they got home, and so he knew what happened on the show (and he wasn't sure how he didn't get a concussion from Del Rio kicking the back of his head), but other than that, nothing was coming to him.

"What did we do after Raw on Monday?" he asked, turning in her lap so he was looking up at her. "I mean, I know what happened on Raw, that much is clear, I watched that, so I at least know what went on, we're going to watch SmackDown, but what about the time in between? I know we obviously drove because we had the SUV, but did anything happen?"

AJ stared straight ahead for a long moment, as if she was going over the events in her own mind. He wished he could reach into her mind and grab the memories flooding her thoughts and press them into his own brain, taking them for his own or at the very least reminding his brain what happened so his own memories could jumpstart and come back to him. He always saw movies where the memories would flush in like a broken dam, but it was not like that at all. It was just a void.

"Just drove from Virginia to North Carolina."

"But there was that picture you posted on your Twitter account, we were joking around, right? Why?"

"Because I got speared, remember how we watched it, and I was joking that you were trying to make me feel better with sugar, but it wasn't working because I was so upset over the spear," AJ explained to him.

He gave a short laugh, "That's totally something we would do, just goof around. So other than that, nothing happened, huh?"

"No, just drove like usual," she said wistfully. "Just like every week."

"_So now I'm your photographer, do I get a pay raise?" E joked as he handed AJ her phone back. She laughed and pocketed it, intending to post the picture when they were back in the car. She and Dolph were becoming more and more comfortable revealing parts of their real relationship and bit by bit, they were being more truthful to the state of their love. She and Dolph had been together for going on nine months now, their storyline a product of their real-life relationship, and it felt like it was time to really let people see them as they actually were, starting with their penchant for goofing around._

"_No," Dolph joked, "but I will buy you whatever you want here."_

"_Gee, thanks, surrogate Dad," E told him, pretending to light up, "I'm going to actually go outside and get gas for our car now, you two can continue stocking up on so much sugar you can probably run to Raleigh."_

"_At least we'll be awake for SmackDown," AJ shrugged. "And thank you for being the responsible adult, E, what would we do without you?"_

"_You'd look like a couple of escaped asylum patients," he joked as he turned to walk out of the store to pump gas into their car for the next leg of their trip._

_Dolph turned to put away the sour gummi worms and AJ grabbed his forearm, "Um, excuse me, sir, who said you could put those away?"_

"_Oh, sorry," he said in a sarcastic voice as AJ grabbed a couple bags. "I thought you were so inconsolable?"_

"_Well, the sugar _may_ help," she told him, winking at him as she turned to look at some other candy behind her. While her back was turned, Dolph pulled something out of his pocket and put it into the box of Ring Pops. He turned back around and thrust the box at her. _

"_Hey, you want a Ring Pop?" he asked her. She laughed and turned to him. "I think they have strawberry, your favorite."_

"_Since when do you know my favorites, stalker," she joked as she looked inside the box and saw what appeared to be a ring box sitting on top of it. "Um, what is that?"_

"_What's what?" he asked innocently, but he was starting to grin._

"_Um, the box that's sitting on top of the candy, the one that is just sitting there, staring at me," AJ pointed lightly._

"_I don't know, could be anything, could have fallen out of a Cracker Jack box or something, you should probably open it though, see if it needs to go to the lost and found," Dolph told her. AJ just stood there, staring at it like a snake was going to pop out. "Okay, fine, I'll do it, but this is not the way it was supposed to go."_

"_The way _what_ was supposed to go?" AJ asked, her throat suddenly dry as she wanted to go grab a gallon of water and chug it down to get this parched feeling out of her throat. "Dolph, what's going on? What are you doing? Why do you have a box? What's in the box?"_

"_Gwyneth Paltrow's head," he answered as he flipped it open. It was exactly what she thought it was. "I know, I know, you could say a lot of things, you could say this is too soon, you could say when did you get this, had it for a while, it was in my nightstand, you could say, wow, look at that rock, you could say, Dolph, I don't wear rings, what are you thinking? I don't care what you say about this as long as you say yes."_

"_We're in a gas station," she told him._

"_Is that what this place is? Is that why E is getting gas? God, and here, I was just playing along," he told her. "Look, here's the deal—"_

"_There's a deal?"_

"_Well, I'm not talking contracts or anything," he told her. "I'm saying that I've known since our first date that you were it for me. I don't know how I knew because frankly it didn't really stand out from any other first dates I ever had, it was dinner and a movie, but you were the factor that made it different. I knew then, so you know, I want to marry you."_

"_That's your idea of a proposal?"_

"_No, my idea of a proposal is just saying that I love you, I want to be with you, and I would be really, really happy if you said yes, but no, it's not going to be me telling you you're the most beautiful girl in the world and that I'll try to make you happy every day for the rest of our lives, I mean, look at me, you know I'll do that."_

"_You don't think I'm the most beautiful girl in the world?"_

"_You know you are, I think you have like 100 tweets a day that stroke that massive ego of yours."_

_AJ preened a little bit, "I can't help it if I have so many admirers. But…I guess if I had to have one person tell me I'm pretty every day for the rest of my life, I'd want it to be you."_

_Dolph looked down and smiled to himself. He put the candy back on the shelf and grabbed the ring. He was about to put it on her finger, but she pulled away. He looked at her confused, but watched as she took the skull necklace off and put the ring on it. He leaned over and kissed her, grabbing the necklace and putting it back around her neck, watching as it fell against her shirt._

"_Beautiful," he told her. "Come on, E is probably hating us right now."_

"_Should we tell him?" AJ asked._

"_Let's keep it our secret for a few days, just until we can really celebrate when we get home."_

"_Okay, just until we can celebrate."_

There was no celebration, just her helping him inside and upstairs and into bed. There were no secret laughs or smiles, waiting just the right amount of time before they told everyone the news. No, there wasn't any of that. There was simply a ring that hung around her neck, hidden in her shirt. Dolph was too out of it to notice, too focused on getting better that he didn't notice the circular bulge just under her shirt. She just wanted to keep it a little while longer, pretend like they both knew what happened in a little gas station in between Roanoke and Raleigh.

"I wish I could remember," he told her, "we looked like dorks in that picture."

"We had fun that night," she responded, her fingers removing themselves from his scalp and seeking out his hand. "But we have fun every night, right?"

"That's why I love you," Dolph told her.

"I love you too," she said immediately, "I love you so much."

"I'm sorry you were scared," his voice quieted a little bit. "I'm sorry you were worried about me. I'm sorry I forgot two days with you, I hate that. I hate that I even lost a second with you, let alone two days."

"It's alright, it's not your fault, none of it was your fault," she told him, going back to stroking his hair. "It was just a freak thing, alright?"

"How freak could it have been if Jack did it two days in a row pretty much?"

"Shh, we're not going to dwell on that," AJ reprimanded him. If she thought too long and too hard about the carelessness in the ring both Monday and Tuesday, she might want to punch Jack in the face. As it stood, she tried not to blame him for knocking one of the most important moments of her life out of her boyfriend's brain.

"Fine," he told her, "I love you though, for being here for me, thank you for that, thank you for being you, and being with me, and putting up with me. You don't know how much I love you for it."

Except she did.

Dolph fell asleep a few minutes later, something he did a lot of right now, and something he needed. She slowly slid out from underneath him, putting a pillow under his head in her stead. She crept upstairs and into their bedroom, sitting on her side of the bed. It was time to let go of everything. The memory was damaged, and above all, she didn't want to take that moment away from him. She would cherish it always, and maybe someday she would tell him, but only down the line, only after things settled down. Then maybe she would share it, hope that he could remember some of it, and they could laugh, but not right now.

She opened up her nightstand, taking out the box sitting in it. She placed it down on top of her nightstand, leaving it open as she reached for her necklace, unhooking it deftly and pulling it out of her shirt. She slid the ring off it and looked at it for a long moment. She never really got to take a good look at it, but it was beautiful, and tasteful, and small because she hated gaudy things. She slipped it on her ring finger for a moment, just to see how it would look before she slipped it off again, setting it in the box. With a click, it shut.

She stood up and walked to the other side of the bed, sitting down again as she opened the drawer. It was a mess, with books and other personal items scattered around. She placed the box on top of it all, looking at it for a long moment before she slowly closed the door. One day, maybe even soon, he'd grab that box again and the ring would find its way around her neck again. She was sure of it. Dolph's love wasn't knocked out of his brain, so she knew her and the ring would meet again.

And when it happened again, it would be a memory they both remembered.


End file.
